Engine Yard CEO John Dillon talks expansion

Cloud-computing platform for developers goes from Ruby on Rails, to PHP and then to...

Engine Yard, which provides a development environment on top of services like Amazon Web Services for engineers to quickly build and deploy applications, is expanding beyond its origins to service Ruby on Rails developers. The company recently acquired Orchestra to support the even larger market of PHP developers.

For every Ruby developer, there are two to three developing on PHP, said Engine Yard CEO John Dillon, who came in for an interview.

In this interview, watch Dillon, who was appointed chief executive in 2009, explain why Engine Yard has widened its net and why it's not supporting other agile development programs, like Python.

Ever since Salesforce purchased Heroku for $212 million in cash last December, Engine Yard has become the dominant private company player providing PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) to Rails developers. If you're not familiar with Engine Yard, or it's just too techie for you, listen to Dillon explain how Engine Yard works with companies, developers and cloud platforms, like Amazon Web Services. We also talk about expansion plans and business details. For instance, Dillon said the average customer is paying being $500 to $1000 a month, with some outliers paying a lot more.

Watch for our next interview, in which we talk business model and revenue growth.